Shortages of blank card stock have disrupted the printing of two of Sri Lanka’s most widely used official documents at the same time, with around one million national identity cards awaiting issuance and driving licence applicants being handed temporary permits instead of the real thing.

The Daily Mirror reported on Thursday evening that the printing of National Identity Cards has been disrupted by a shortage of plastic cards, with roughly a million cards awaiting issue. The plastic NIC, carrying a 12-digit national identity number, was introduced in 2017 to replace the laminated card used for decades; reducing production costs was one of the stated objectives at the time.

Six minutes later the same newsroom filed on the driving licence backlog, attributing the delay to a shortage of both printing cards and machines.

What the Motor Traffic Department says

Commissioner General of Motor Transport, retired Air Vice Marshal Thushara Fernando, said the Department of Motor Traffic expects to take delivery of several printing machines by mid-November. The new machines will double the department’s licence printing capacity, he said, and the department expects to resume issuing driving licences under normal conditions by around April next year.

Until then, applicants continue to receive temporary licences while the department works through the backlog.

A figure that does not reconcile

The Daily Mirror’s headline and opening line put the number of unprinted driving licences at “more than 6.5 million.” This desk is not able to reconcile that figure, and readers should treat it with caution.

Reporting by the Daily FT, which this desk has verified directly against the outlet’s own pages, puts the backlog roughly an order of magnitude lower and falling:

For the backlog to have reached 6.5 million by 29 October, roughly 5.8 million additional licences would have had to enter the queue in eleven days — in a country of about 22 million people, and against a backlog that was shrinking over the preceding fortnight. The arithmetic does not support it.

A simpler reading is a unit slip: 6.5 lakh is 650,000, which sits squarely on the trend line the Daily FT reported. This desk is stating the discrepancy rather than resolving it, because no filing published today gives a figure that can be checked.

The Daily FT’s October reporting also shows the equipment timetable has moved. On 5 October, officials told Parliament’s Sectoral Oversight Committee on Infrastructure and Strategic Development, chaired by MP S.M. Marikkar, that two new printing machines were expected to be installed by 15 October, lifting daily capacity to 8,200. The committee ordered a formal investigation into the delays affecting both number plates and driving licences, with a full report due within 45 days. The Commissioner General now places the arrival of machines in mid-November.

Not reported

Neither filing names the supplier or the cause of the card stock shortage, says when fresh plastic card stock for NICs is expected, or gives a target date for clearing the identity card backlog. Neither states whether the two shortages share a cause or a supplier, despite both being card-stock problems reported within six minutes of each other. The driving licence filing does not say how many temporary licences have been issued or how long they remain valid, and the NIC filing does not say whether the disruption affects one-day services, replacements and first-time applications alike.

The Daily Mirror is the only verified newsroom to have filed on either shortage today; no other outlet had published on them at the time of writing.

Sources

Context cited in prose but outside the current news window, and therefore not counted as sourcing for this report: Daily FT, 5 October 2026 and 18 October 2026.